Maybe you’ve been using eBay for a while and feel like you could make a living there. Maybe you just want to work from home and heard eBay’s a good place to do that. Whatever the reason, you’ve found yourself wondering how to start an eBay business—and one that will succeed rather than wasting your time and money.

You’ve come to the right place. Here’s how to go from just thinking about it to becoming a successful entrepreneur:

Getting past the Initial Worries

Good questions. But let me reassure you: the fees only total about 15% of what you charge the customer, and you can still make money on eBay if you follow a few best practices.

It does take work. You must be ready to put your shoulder to the plow. If you are, though, then you can easily grow your eBay business from a profitable hobby to a part-time or even full-time job.

Before Starting an eBay Business

Get the Lay of the Land

You first need to gain a basic understanding of eBay. Create a seller account if you haven’t yet (you can find instructions in “Selling on eBay for Beginners”), then use it to buy a good 10 or 20 items. Pay promptly and leave Feedback for the sellers.

This will achieve three goals:

You’ll learn what makes listings sell if you pay attention to which ones you buy from and which you skip over.

You’ll see firsthand how eBay works if you haven’t already.

You’ll get positive feedback from most of the sellers. This will kickstart your Feedback score and show your first buyers that you’re trustworthy.

You can skip this part if you’ve already done some selling on eBay and have a decent Feedback score.

Choose a Business Model

Review these eBay business models and decide which one best suits you and your budget. Some systems work best for energetic, sharp-eyed bargain hunters on shoestring budgets (such as retail arbitrage), while others need smooth negotiators with heavy wallets (like wholesaling).

How to Start an eBay Business

Now that you have the knowledge you need and a seller account, it’s time to start making money! Follow these three steps to go from small-time eBay seller to successful entrepreneur as quickly as possible:

Sprint for Top Rated Seller Status

What makes Top Rated Seller status worth the fuss? Three things:

20% off final value fees on any listings eligible for Top Rated Plus status. More money in your pocket on every sale!

Higher search rankings. That means more buyers will see your listings, making them far more likely to sell.

Improved customer trust. Anyone who sees the Top Rated Plus icon on your listing and knows what it means will view you as a more trustworthy seller. More sales again!

So, you’ll make more sales and more money per sale. It’s worth sustaining a few losses to reach those benefits!

You might think you’d need a lot of experience to become a Top Rated Seller. But it’s actually quite easy: you just need to have made at least 100 sales and sold at least $1,000 worth of stuff within the last year, and provided exceptional customer service while doing it.

Get Professional

The key to high profits on eBay isn’t what you sell, but how well you sell it.

Say you’re trying to sell a jacket. If your photo shows it lying on a dirty carpet, you’ll have a hard time selling it at all, and if you do it won’t be for what it’s really worth. Show it on a mannequin or an attractive model against a clean white background, however, and it will sell for a much higher price.

Here are a few things you can do to get the best price from every item you sell:

Make sure auctions end at peak times so they have high buyer competition in the exciting final hours before the item sells.

Ask yourself about each aspect of selling, “Do I really know what I’m doing here?” If not, take the time to learn it or consider hiring somebody who already has. Understanding things as small as how to light your products well can make an enormous difference in sales.

Expand and Conquer

Who says you should limit your business to eBay? Once you establish a steady stream of income there, you can expand your operation to reach new market segments.

Selling on eBay and Amazon will enable you to reach more than double the number of customers available on eBay alone. It only makes sense to expand onto the big river, since it takes little more work than eBay does and you’ll have already mastered the basics of ecommerce.

But plenty of people also use Google and the search engines for shopping. If you want to reach this sizable consumer segment, then creating an online store could be a wise investment. This takes a lot more knowledge, work, and skill than selling on the marketplaces, but allows you to sell fee-free and gives you much more control over your marketing and pricing.

The downside? Operating on multiple platforms can make your business a bit trickier to run. Multichannel customer service integration software, inventory management software like ecomdash, and other similar offerings can centralize aspects of your business so you don’t have to keep switching from site to site. With their help, Amazon and your online store can become sources of extra revenue rather than extra frustration.

Summary

Figuring out how to start an eBay business is often the toughest part. Once you make your first few sales, though, it’s all downhill. Follow the strategies outlined here and you’ll go from starting an eBay business to making five figures or more in no time.

"ChannelReply has allowed us to increase the productivity of
our customer service department by consolidating the messaging
from multiple marketplaces directly into Zendesk. As with most
retail businesses, we sell on multiple online channels.
Streamlining customer interactions from these marketplaces
has been crucial to both our customers' experience and our growth.
ChannelReply has done a wonderful job in developing and supporting
this functionality."

JC Webster

COO, Chicago Music Exchange

"ChannelReply has allowed us to integrate multiple eBay and Amazon accounts
into Zendesk creating accountability and making it easy to scale our marketplace
customer service. Without ChannelReply it would be unmanageable to provide the
level of satisfaction our customers expect out of Golfio.
The integration with the eBay and Amazon messaging API is tight and we
couldn't be happier!"

Howard Choi

Business Dev Manager Golfio

"Given the various standards of service that apply, managing multiple marketplace
channels is a challenge to any organization. ChannelReply has given us the ability
to organize our inquries to maximize turnaround and increase our efficiency when
handling our marketplace requests. We look forward to additional features ChannelReply is offering that will only increase our ability to service our customers
across channels."